Ask anyone with a passing knowledge of downtown San Francisco why Millennium Tower condos sell cheap, and you'll get the same answer: the building sinks. That answer is only partly true anymore, and the part that's wrong matters more to your wallet than the part that's right.
The $100 million foundation fix at 301 Mission Street was declared complete in 2023. Engineer Ronald Hamburger's team drove 18 concrete piles 275 feet into bedrock to stop the tower's northwest corner from settling further, and by mid-2025 the building had recovered roughly two inches of its lean, down to about 28 inches. A separate, slower settlement at the center of the foundation slab has since drawn scrutiny from outside engineers as a longer-term issue distinct from the corner that was repaired. But the finding that mattered to city inspectors stands: the tower is not sinking the way it was in 2016.
Condos there keep selling for a fraction of what the original owners paid anyway. Sellers who closed in 2025 took an average 20.2 percent loss against their original purchase price. The year before, it was 20.5 percent. If the fix worked, why hasn't the market caught up?
It has. Just not in the way the building's critics or its homeowners association would have you believe.
The Financing Problem You'll Hit Before the Price Problem
For years, the harder obstacle for a Millennium Tower buyer wasn't the price tag. It was the loan. Conventional lenders stayed away from the building for the better part of a decade. San Francisco Chronicle reporting from 2023 found that buyers needed to pay cash or turn to a private, high-interest hard money loan, which kept large pools of ordinary buyers out of the building no matter how attractive the price looked on paper.
That started to shift in 2025, when Citizens Bank became one of the first major lenders willing to underwrite mortgages in the tower again. Treat that as a data point, not a guarantee. One lender closing one deal doesn't mean every lender will close yours. If you're seriously looking at a unit here, get a jumbo or portfolio lender on the phone before you write an offer. Ask directly whether they'll lend on this specific building today, what down payment they'll require, and whether their underwriting has actually changed since the fix or whether that one deal was an exception.
Doing the Math the Building's Critics and Its Defenders Both Skip
Here's where the story gets more interesting than "still sinking" or "totally fixed." Neither camp does the arithmetic that actually matters to a buyer: how much of the discount is Millennium Tower, specifically, and how much is just downtown San Francisco.
Across SoMa and Mission Bay, the neighborhoods surrounding the tower, condo median prices have fallen nearly 19 percent from 2019 levels, driven by remote work's hollowing-out of downtown office demand. That's the backdrop against which the tower's own losses need to be read.
Set the tower's 20.2 percent average loss in 2025 next to that 19 percent citywide decline, and what's left over for stigma, the tax buyers are demanding specifically because this is the building that sank, comes out to roughly one to two percentage points. Not the double-digit premium a decade of headlines would lead you to expect. Not nothing either.
| Metric | Figure | Time Window |
|---|---|---|
| Millennium Tower average seller loss | 20.5% | 2024 closings |
| Millennium Tower average seller loss | 20.2% | 2025 closings |
| SoMa / Mission Bay condo median decline | ~19% | Since 2019 |
That's a genuinely different story than either side is telling. The building's harshest critics treat every below-purchase-price sale as proof the market still distrusts the engineering. The HOA's messaging, understandably, wants to attribute the whole decline to a soft downtown market it didn't cause. The math suggests both are overstating their case.
HOA president Dr. Joel Piser put the frustration plainly to the Wall Street Journal: "We've gotten so much negative press. We were easy targets, a bunch of people who have been successful in life and then are faced with this challenge. Now, we have something to counter it with. We have met the project's objective to stop the building from settling, and we're recovering."
He's not wrong that the fix worked. He's also not wrong that some of what's dragging prices down has nothing to do with his building. The genuinely open question is whether that one-to-two-point premium keeps shrinking as more time passes without incident, or whether it settles in as a permanent feature of owning here.
What the Comps Actually Show
The spread inside the building tells its own story. In January 2025, a 5,000-square-foot penthouse on the 60th floor sold for $9 million, the highest resale of a downtown San Francisco condo since 2018, according to Sotheby's agent Gregg Lynn, who represented the seller. That same unit had asked $14 million when it first listed in 2023. Around the same period, a one-bedroom unit hit the market at $649,000, a 41 percent drop from its $1.1 million sale price a decade earlier. A separate buyer picked up a unit for $850,000, 45 percent below its 2016 price, citing renewed lender confidence and the penthouse sale itself as reasons to move.
Those three numbers aren't describing the same market. They describe three different bets: one on the top of the building holding its exclusivity regardless of history, one on a genuine bargain hunt at the entry level, and one on the theory that sentiment has already turned and the discount window won't stay open.
If you're weighing Millennium Tower against other downtown towers such as One Rincon Hill, 181 Fremont, or The Avery, the comparison has to happen unit by unit, not median to median. Those buildings don't carry Millennium's history, and at current prices they may or may not offer better risk-adjusted value depending on the floor plan and the view.
What the Building Still Owes You in Paperwork
None of this replaces ordinary diligence. If anything, it raises the bar. Before you make an offer:
- Request the HOA resale package and read it in full. In any San Francisco condo purchase this is the single most important document in the deal. At Millennium Tower, it's doubly true.
- Review the current reserve study and how the HOA's reserve funding compares to it. The $100 million fix was paid through the legal settlement and insurers, not HOA reserves, but ongoing monitoring and maintenance costs are a separate line item worth understanding.
- Ask specifically about the master insurance policy: what it covers, whether it's replacement cost or actual cash value, and whether earthquake coverage is included. This building's history makes it a harder underwriting case than a typical downtown high-rise.
- Ask for the most recent engineering monitoring reports, and ask specifically about center-of-foundation settlement data, not just the northwest corner tilt that made headlines. The building has committed to continued monitoring for years to come.
What This Means If You're Actually Looking Here
If you're buying to live in the tower long-term and you can absorb the financing uncertainty, the current pricing is arguably the most honest it's been since 2016. You're not paying for a building that's still sinking. You're paying a modest premium on top of a soft downtown market, one that may compress further as monitoring continues to show stability, or may not. If you need fast resale optionality, or you're counting on conventional Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac financing rather than a jumbo or portfolio lender, this may not be the building for you right now.
The honest read, matching what the building's advocates and its skeptics both get partly right, is that Millennium Tower is neither the disaster the 2016 headlines described nor the fully repaired bargain the HOA's public relations effort wants you to believe. The engineering risk has been substantially addressed. The pricing risk is now mostly a downtown San Francisco story, with a smaller and possibly shrinking premium attached to the building's own name.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Millennium Tower still sinking? The northwest corner settlement that made headlines in 2016 was arrested by the 2023 perimeter pile upgrade, and the tower has recovered roughly two inches of tilt since. A separate, slower settlement at the center of the foundation slab has drawn attention from outside engineers as a longer-term issue to watch, distinct from the corner that was fixed.
Can I get a mortgage on a unit there? Conventional-adjacent financing returned to the building in 2025 through lenders including Citizens Bank, after years when buyers needed cash or hard money loans. Availability still varies by lender, so confirm financing before you're in contract rather than assuming one closed deal means yours will close the same way.
Is the discount likely to disappear? Nobody can answer that with certainty. The bulk of the current discount tracks the broader SoMa and Mission Bay condo market, which has fallen nearly 19 percent since 2019 for reasons that have nothing to do with this specific building. The smaller, building-specific premium on top of that may keep shrinking as more time passes without incident, or it may become a permanent feature of owning here.
If you're weighing a Millennium Tower unit against other downtown San Francisco high-rises, or you want a second opinion on how a specific listing's history should factor into your offer, Jeffrey Marples can walk through the numbers with you. Request a personalized market consultation before you write the offer, not after.
